Uncharted: The Fourth Labyrinth (2 page)

“Three years ago, Valdez hired me to lead a team into Pacariqtambo and bring back whatever artifacts we could find. But what he really wanted was the golden staff of Ayar Manco. After I brought it to him, he decided he’d rather kill me than pay me. I barely got out of Ecuador with my life.”

Alex looked at him like he was crazy. “So you decided to steal it back?”

Drake laughed. “Are you nuts? Valdez eats guys like me for breakfast. No, I figured I was lucky to still be breathing. But the Cuiqawa—the tribe that made those claims about Ayar Manco? They figure they’re probably his closest descendants, so the staff should be theirs. They hired me to get it back.”

“And you took the job? After Valdez almost killed you?”

“A guy’s gotta work,” Drake said. “And hey, Valdez went back on a deal. That just doesn’t sit right, y’ know? I figured the least I could do was annoy him a little.”

They held on as the Jeep dropped into a streambed, splashed through, and roared up the other side. The guns had gone quiet, and Drake took a moment to hope Valdez’s goons had given up the chase. Then one of the pursuing Jeeps burst through the vines behind them, and he realized he should have known better. It was never that easy.

“Hey,” Drake said, glancing at Alex as he drove, a fresh burst of gunfire blasting the trees off to his left. “Do you think your father’s offering a reward for your safe return?”

She stared at him. “You said this wasn’t a rescue.”

“No,” Drake replied, “I don’t think I did. And anyway, it’s a moot point, isn’t it? I mean, once a guy’s actually done the rescuing—”

“You haven’t rescued me!” she shouted as a bullet shattered the rearview mirror on her side, showering her hair in shards of glass and metal.

“Well,” Drake said. “Not yet.”

He aimed the Jeep at a gap in the trees that looked too narrow, but they roared through with inches to spare on either side. Alex swore at him and covered her head, then looked up in blinking astonishment that they had not crashed even as Drake floored the gas pedal and the tires spun clods of damp earth into their wake. For a few seconds the clatter of gunfire ceased again, and as they passed through a strangely uniform alley of trees and vines, the hush of the rain forest embraced them, muffling their engine noise.

The Jeep hit a rise, then topped it, and the tires spun without traction for a heartbeat before touching down in a small clearing. Stiff-armed, Drake kept the wheel steady over the rough terrain, but they had run out of room. Thick brush bordered the clearing, and trees grew close and leaned together, conspiratorially close. The only way out was the way Drake had driven in, and Valdez’s gunmen were right behind them.

“Oh, my God, we’re dead!” Alex cried.

Drake drove full tilt toward the far side of the clearing, the trees rushing toward them. At the last second, he cut the wheel to the right and hit the brake, causing the Jeep to fishtail and then shudder to a stop. The engine kicked and died, ticking with the heat of its exertion.

“Put your hands up,” he said.

Alex glanced at him in confusion. “What?”

Drake threw his gun on the floor of the Jeep and climbed out, raising his arms in surrender. “If you don’t want to get shot, put your damn hands up!”

The first of the pursuing vehicles roared into the clearing. Several shots rang out, but Drake started shouting out his surrender in both English and Spanish, lifting his hands higher to show he meant it. He stepped away from the Jeep as Alex finally put up her hands and slipped out, imitating him as best she could. She had started to cry.

Drake thought it was a bad idea to smile, but he had to struggle to keep a straight face. Fear did that to him. He figured Valdez had ordered his thugs to retrieve the girl and the staff of Ayar Manco, and it seemed pretty damn likely that he’d ordered them to kill the thief who had stolen both—which would be him—but he thought surrender would confuse them. Hoped it would, anyway.

The second carload of killers arrived in the clearing as the first came to a shuddering stop twenty feet away from him, their weapons trained on him and Alex. The big truck would be lumbering along somewhere behind. In one of those vehicles would be the guy in charge, some bastard smarter than the other bastards, and in their moment of confusion the killers would wait for him to make the call. If Drake was surrendering, did that mean they should take him back to Valdez alive, or were they still supposed to shoot him?

While they were waiting, they climbed out of the two Jeeps, all of them shouting, spreading out in a circle around Drake and the crying girl, who didn’t seem to understand that they would take her alive to preserve her value as a hostage. Or maybe that was why she was crying, Drake thought. Maybe being taken alive scared her more than dying.

Or maybe you’re just being melodramatic
, he thought. The killers gestured with the barrels of their guns, shouting in Spanish for Drake to get down on his knees. He complied, and Alex did, too, even though nobody had asked her. A short, slender, deadly-looking guy with a mustache that looked like it had been drawn on with a marker jumped down from the back of the second Jeep and walked toward Drake with his gun held down at his side like he was trying to sneak up on them, even though they were all watching him expectantly. This would be the guy, then. Drake waited for him to give the order to fire.

Stencil-mustache man didn’t say a word, though. If his buddies were waiting for orders, they were going to have to keep waiting, because he was a hands-on kind of guy. He pulled a pistol from an armpit holster and strode over, lifted the gun, and pointed it at Drake’s forehead.

“Any time now!” Drake called out, his voice shaking.

The little commandant frowned in surprise, apparently assuming that Drake was trying to rush him into pulling the trigger.

“What are you—” Alex began.

A single shot rang out, sending a flurry of colorful birds shooting skyward from the trees around the clearing. The little man with the ridiculous mustache staggered backward, glanced down in confusion and maybe a little regret at the hole in his chest, and then collapsed into the grass.

Only the fact that Drake and Alex had their hands thrust into the air and so obviously empty kept them alive in that moment. The baffled killers spun around, aiming into the trees, trying to figure out who they were supposed to shoot. One of them even fired a few rounds at nothing.

Then the shadows moved, branches swaying as dozens of guns and faces appeared in the trees. Some were above and some below, some were dressed in the style of local tribesmen and others in the plain garb of migrant workers, but they were all armed. There were guns as well as bows with arrows strung and even some knives ready to be thrown. Other than the cocking of the weapons and the rustle of the trees, they made no sound.

One of Valdez’s men started shouting at the others to fire, as if he needed to have someone else pull the trigger so he didn’t have to go first. An arrow thunked into the ground inches away from his mud-crusted left boot. He stared at the arrow for a second or two and then threw his gun into the grass.

A moment later, the rest of the killers started discarding their weapons and the Cuiqawa tribe swiftly emerged from the trees and surrounded them. Several of the tribesmen hurried to Drake’s stolen Jeep, and one of them lifted the burlap-wrapped staff from the backseat, shook it in triumph, and nodded his thanks. Drake hoped the guy realized he hadn’t gone in after the staff just to win the tribe’s gratitude.

He stood and went over to Alex. The girl still looked terrified, staring at the Cuiqawa as though they might be a new threat. Drake helped her to her feet.

“How ’bout now?” he asked. “Does this count as a rescue?”

2

Drake spent most of the flight from Guayaquil to Chicago catching up on his sleep. After the adrenaline rush of days spent trying not to die, he felt completely spent, yet at the same time he was filled with a rare contentment. He’d set right a wrong Valdez had done him, restored a cultural artifact to its rightful owner—granted, he’d been the one to steal it in the first place—and now was going home with more real money in his pocket than he’d had in a long while.

The tribe had paid his fee for retrieving the golden staff, but the mayor of Guayaquil had paid even more for the pleasure of getting his daughter back alive. The fact that the latter deed had been purely, if somewhat irritatingly, accidental only made the reward that much sweeter. It was the kind of luck that didn’t come his way often, and he couldn’t wait to share the story of his good fortune with Victor Sullivan, his best friend and sometime partner in ventures like this one.

There were several squalling children on the flight, and the sumo-size passenger in the seat behind him didn’t seem very happy about Drake reclining his seat, but he felt impervious to the world’s attempts to disrupt his contentment. With in-flight music quietly piped into his brain through the free headphones, he managed to sleep through the movie, waking up just long enough for the gooey chicken and broccoli dish that might have been dinner or maybe some kind of breakfast omelet if the congealed stuff around the chicken and veggies turned out to be egg.

The flight landed almost fifteen minutes early—just before ten o’clock in the morning—and when Drake unbuckled his seat belt and stood up, obviously content and well rested, he thought he caught several envious glances from other passengers. Most of them looked pale and weary, but he felt good as he retrieved his backpack from under the seat and his duffel from the overhead compartment. The sumo who’d been unhappy about his reclined seat was still trying to unwedge himself from 17D when Drake filed off the plane.

As he traveled from one terminal to another, he smelled cinnamon rolls, and his stomach rumbled. He had managed to keep down the hideous concoction the airline had fed its passengers, but he was definitely hungry again, and cinnamon rolls were one of his lifelong weaknesses. Like kryptonite—if kryptonite was soft and warm and covered in sugar and Superman liked to eat it.
Or something
, he thought.

While waiting in line for his cinnamon roll and looking forward to American coffee, he reached into his pocket and took out his cell phone, which had been off for the duration of the flight. He turned it on and saw that he’d missed some calls during the flight and had some messages. The first one consisted of a woman’s drunken rambling, and he decided it must be a wrong number. The second message was from Vivian, the woman who operated as his travel agent whenever he needed to make a journey that kept his movements off the grid. Drake did a little too much improvising for Vivian’s taste and she often chided him for not using her services more often, but this call was to admonish him for flying from Ecuador to the USA using his own passport. He didn’t like to do it, afraid to draw any scrutiny from Homeland Security, but he was just a guy visiting South America, not some jihadist taking flying lessons and then spending a few weeks training to blow himself up in some secret mountain stronghold in Afghanistan.

The third message was from Sully.

“Nate, it’s me. Call me as soon as you get this. Something’s up, and I could use a second set of eyes. Another brain wouldn’t hurt ei—”

The phone beeped, and he glanced at it, surprised to see that it was Sully calling again. He thumbed the button to switch over to the incoming call.

“Sully,” he said, frowning. “What’s so important?”

Motion out of the corner of his eye drew his attention, and he flinched, on edge after the last few days, but it was just the girl behind the counter handing him a bag that exuded the delightful aroma of cinnamon.

“You on U.S. soil, Nate?” Sully asked.

“I’ve got a layover in Chicago,” Drake said as he made his way to a small table where he could sit with his back to the corner.

He could hear Sully pausing and thought he heard the man exhale. Smoking a cigar, Drake thought. Sully quit about once a month and spent a lot of time chewing the end of an unlit Cuban, as if daring himself to light it. This morning, he had obviously needed a smoke.

“Chicago,” Sully said, his gruff voice even raspier than usual. “How fast can you get to New York?”

Nate paused with the sticky cinnamon bun halfway to his mouth.

“What’s in New York?”

He could hear Sully blow out another lungful of cigar smoke before answering.

“Murder.”

Just after three-thirty in the afternoon, Drake sat in the back of a New York City taxicab, breathing in smoke from the incense the cabbie had been burning and watching the green street signs go by on the way to Grand Central Station. He could have taken a shuttle bus directly from JFK International Airport in Queens to Grand Central in the heart of Manhattan, but Sully’s urgency had been clear, and for once Drake was flush with cash.

He wished only that Sully had been more forthcoming over the phone. Drake had spent his whole life learning how to roll with the punches, and a big part of that had been Sully’s tendency to spring things on him at the last minute. But he didn’t think Sully’s reluctance to go into detail had anything to do with the aging treasure hunter’s usual games. Just before Sully had rushed off the phone, Drake had heard a woman crying in the background. If his old friend and mentor didn’t want to talk about murder, he figured it was because someone else in the room was grieving. Sully would never be accused of being the sensitive type, but neither was he heartless.

A grieving friend also would explain why Sully hadn’t come to the airport to meet him when his plane landed. If he needed Drake for backup for some reason, normally Sully would have wanted to brief him as soon as possible. Instead, he had just asked Drake to meet him under the clock on the main concourse of Grand Central Station.

The cab dropped him off in front of a restaurant called Pershing Square that was practically hidden beneath the elevated Park Avenue Viaduct. Drake paid the cabbie but barely looked at the man, his thoughts running ahead of him. He’d been lucky enough to catch a flight from Chicago within half an hour of talking to Sully on the phone, and throughout the nearly two and a half hours in the air and the duration of the cab ride, he had mostly been able to let his mind drift or focus on other things. But now that he had arrived, he couldn’t help being worried.